The Perfidy of Backstabbing Proofreaders and Insufferable Clients

It probably has happened to you already, possibly more than once – and if not, it will at some point, trust me.

You have finished a translation with a sense of great satisfaction and you feel kind of happy and proud of yourself because you know that you did a really good job …. only to receive, days later, an e-mail from somebody who found your masterpiece unsatisfactory.

Most of the time, the person who did not like your translation is an anonymous proofreader working for a translation agency, often a freelancer. Sometime the e-mail includes an attachment showing the changes, which are often laughable and inappropriate, or simply a matter of personal preference.

The problem is, it is very easy to tear to pieces any translation, all you have to do is turn on the redlining feature in MS Word and start making changes. The proofreaders who are hired to check other people’s translation are either in-house project managers (who usually don’t understand the source language and who also happen to make very little money), or freelance translators who are often very happy to be able to proofread other people’s translation because they can’t find better paying work.

I proofread very carefully les chef-d’oeuvres of translators who work for me, but I have not proofread anything for a translation agency in more than 20 years. I prefer to translate, and the rates are too low anyway. The fact is that most of the time, the proofreader is either a newbie translator who does not understand what his job is about, a subprime translator (I explained this category in this post), or a zombie translator (see my explanation of the term here).

Sometime a proofreader will shamelessly backstab the translator because he wants to ingratiate himself to the translation agency in order to get the next gig for himself. Or the proofreader simply has no clue as to what the job of a proofreader is really about. Sometime you can see how clueless they are from the questions they ask, but usually they just go ahead and mutilate your translation.  In my opinion, the job of a proofreader is to look for typos, omissions and inconsistencies. That is all, and a good proofreader knows that. I know that because I am a good proofreader.

But many proofreaders do not realize that this is their job’s description as they seem to think that they can willfully keep editing away to their heart’s desire. What often happens in such cases is that the translation agency will demand a discount from the translator based on a redlined version of a good translation that ends up being disfigured by an ignorant, obnoxious, or malevolent proofer.

Sometime even a direct client can be translator’s worst enemy. Once I translated a handwritten college transcript from the seventies. It took me forever to design a complicated table corresponding to the format of the transcript, which was a booklet with two  pages that had to fit into one page of the translation. After I e-mailed the result of my labor to the client, he said that my translation was unacceptable because when I could not read the signatures of various lecturers, my translation said simply [illegible signature]. He insisted that those names were perfectly legible.

Which they were. Every single signature of every single lecturer and professor in my transcript are perfectly legible …. to me. I made the person prepay, of course, but instead of arguing with him, I simply returned his 250 dollars.

Once my translation of a French patent application was corrected by an in-house French engineer who kept correcting my translation ad nauseam. For example, when I translated “volé” as “stolen”, as in “a thief who steals data of people who use unsecured unsecured public networks”, he insisted that “volé” should obviously have been translated as “spirited away”.

OK, I admit, “spirited away” sounds très cool, but how the hell was I supposed to know that this was the “technical term” that they wanted me to use? So I gave the geniuses a discount and never worked for them again. Good riddance.

On occasions like these I try to simply cut my losses and get rid of the client ASAP because life is short and then you die. Sometime I have to give them a discount to get at least some money from them, and three times in 26 years I have not been paid at all.

For some reason, I remember each of these humiliating occasions with perfect clarity, although the first one happened 20 years ago, and the last one 7 years ago. I prefer not to fight with these people because I want to save my energy for fights that I consider more worthwhile, but I hate the people who did this to me with a burning hatred. Fortunately, I never met them in person and hopefully never will because I could easily cause them serious bodily harm.

I think that the key to happiness and longevity for translators is not to dwell on personal Waterloos of this kind and instead to concentrate on the good things in life, like good food, good wine, or the companionship of somebody who will be always straight with me and never betray and backstab me… by which I obviously mean my dog.